Inventory control is important to any business, and is especially important to inventories of vehicles, as they can be driven away at any time. Car lots, construction equipment yards, and even hospital equipment storage rooms could be better managed if the person in charge knew where the inventory was. Just knowing whether or not everything is put away in its proper place can be a critical piece of information. Even though inventory control is a very important aspect of many businesses, in this application, we look at one special aspect, the aspect of the last remaining parking space, even though the principles of inventory control work equally well for any inventory control application.
At one time or another, nearly every driver in an urban area has experienced the anguish of looking for a parking space in a highly crowded parking lot, above ground parking deck, multi-level below ground parking lot, or the like. Since there is no way to visually assess whether or not there is a parking space available, and the parking garage operator does not have any way of telling you whether or not there's an empty space, your only option is to drive through all of the aisles and look for an available parking space.
Who hasn't gone to the airport and looked for a long period of time for an available parking space while the minutes are ticking away towards the departure of your airplane? Anyone who has had this experience knows that it would be a great advantage if a system existed that would indicate whether or not at least one parking space was available out of all of the parking spaces in the lot or garage.
It would be also desirable for such a system to have a signaling system of some sort, whether it is a system similar to a red/green traffic light or an electronic message sign that would alert drivers entering a parking facility to whether or not an available parking space exists. For example, if all the spaces were full, an indicator light would appear as a “red” or a message sign would indicate full. In the event that there were available spaces, the indicator light would show “green” or “OPEN” for a message sign, which would indicate to the driver that there was an available spot. The person would be guided to the level and then subsequently to the row where the available space is located by the green indicator signs. An additional feature of the system would have an indicator display that would also tell you the number of available space(s) as well as the location of the parking space that was available.
In the past, more complicated conventional parking lot and garage systems have been utilized for automatic parking director systems in order to signal available parking spaces. Some have even showed displays which indicate the exact open parking space. These “intelligent parking garages” have been studied for many years and several have arisen, but at a very high cost. Such systems are able to detect the presence and/or absence of a vehicle in a particular parking space in a parking lot having a plurality of parking spaces, identifying the space location that is available for use and automatically providing the location to the prospective user in short order.
By the way of example, we now look to U.S. Pat. No. 7,026,954 issued Apr. 11, 2006 to Slemmer et al. and assigned to Bell South Intellectual Property Corporation of Wilmington, Del. Although the system would surely be reliable, it involves the use of individual sensors at each parking space, and therefore the cost is too high for most parking garages. This prior art invention includes a plurality of serially connected sensors/detectors for each parking space working in conjunction with a radio transmission tower, or internet communication device, along with all the problems that those devices exhibit. Due to the expense and extreme complexity of this system, the Bell South IP Corp. system has not found great utility in the United States.
In other attempts to solve this problem, The University of Wisconsin, Madison Campus Transportation Society has been interested in this problem for several years, and has published various papers which disclose further sensors, microsensors, custom dash developed communication systems, and the like, although none of those systems have found great utility in this art area.
Therefore, it would desirable and advantageous to provide a parking space detector or inventory control system which is much lower in cost, and which may or may not identify the individual parking space which is available. Sufficient to say, if a driver is aware that an available parking space is located anywhere within the parking garage, they would be happy to go find it. My invention also includes further embodiments which would be able to be intelligent and discern which of the available parking spaces were empty.
Therefore, my invention discloses a new, advantageous parking space detector or inventory control system which is much lower in cost than the above-mentioned technologies, and which will provide sufficient information to allow a driver to determine whether or not there are available spaces in the parking structure, lot or garage.